This past week, I had the pleasure of delivering the opening keynote at the Elia Group Agile & UX Days in Brussels. After 15 years in digital strategy and interaction design—fueled by a background and passion in user research (and yes, a PhD from Université Paris 2)—my mission remains consistent: elevating UX from a “nice-to-have” design step to a non-negotiable strategic pillar.

The title of my talk was “UX Design for Everyone,” and the core message I challenged the audience with was simple: UX is not a visual cost center; it is a financial control mechanism that protects your entire development budget.

Here is a summary of why UX must move out of the “Make It Pretty” department and into the “Risk Reduction” column.

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The Myth: Why Aesthetics Fails Without Utility

The most common misconception is that UX is about making screens look beautiful (UI). But as we explored with the universally understood “Ketchup Test,” beauty is useless when it fails the moment of truth.

When we look at the iconic glass Heinz bottle, we see superb aesthetic UI—it’s visually stunning and iconic. But when you need the product, it fights you. It forces you to shake, wait, and risk a messy explosion. The design’s function is misaligned with the user’s goal.

For Elia, where we manage mission-critical, real-time data, building “Glass Bottle” software—where the UI looks sleek but forces operators to click five times to find one piece of data—is not just annoying. It’s an unacceptable introduction of operational risk. We need the plastic squeeze bottle: a design where UI and UX are perfectly aligned to prioritize speed, control, and frictionless access.

The Strategic “How”: Solving for Uncertainty

If UX is the navigational system for your project, the Double Diamond is the map.

We use this framework not as an academic diagram, but as a strategic tool to manage risk in two distinct phases:

1. The First Diamond (Discovery & Definition): This is where we solve for uncertainty. We are asking: Are we building the right thing? If we skip this phase and jump straight to coding, we are making an enormous financial gamble. As I joked with the crowd, skipping initial research is the same as deciding to build a new metro line without checking what’s underground first—you guarantee a costly ‘Belgian Metro’ timeline of endless delays and rework. We ensure your development budget is protected by validating the problem first.
2. The Second Diamond (Develop & Deliver): This is where we focus on execution. We are asking: Are we building the thing right? Once the blueprint (UX) is solid, the development team can focus purely on stability and code quality.

The Priceless Insight: Finding the Hidden Feature Request

The reason we can validate a problem (and save thousands of Euros) for only a few hours of research is simple: we watch the user, not the software.

Users are masters of normalization. They adapt to flawed systems and create ingenious workarounds, often forgetting to even report the underlying pain point. My job is to find those hidden adaptations.

During my time with retail sellers at Proximus, I watched an employee selling a new mobile phone. Midway through the process, she pulled out a small, thick, handwritten carnet from under the counter and manually typed a long override code into the system.

That carnet—the “system’s external brain”—was the evidence. It was proof that the system’s Information Architecture (IA) and logic failed to integrate new products with old customer plans. If I hadn’t been in that shop, we would have launched the new POS system, and the sellers would have just copied the content of the old carnet into a new one.

The Call to Partnership

UX is not a service you call to “paint the house” after the construction is finished.

Our mission is to move away from the Waterfall Handoff and forge a Strategic Partnership. We need to be called in the First Diamond to co-write the correct User Stories and help filter out features that add complexity without adding value.

When you partner with us, you don’t just get screens; you get risk-reducing tools: Personas, User Flows, and Wireframes. These ensure your incredible technical expertise is always focused on solving a real problem with maximum efficiency.

Let’s validate the code’s purpose before we write it. Let’s make sure the blueprint is solid before we pour the concrete.

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As a UX design researcher and evangelist, I’m dedicated to breaking down barriers and ensuring design is truly universal. If you want to dive deeper into Information Architecture or prototyping strategies for your next project, feel free to connect!